


Fulton Street Station

by orphan_account



Category: Shadowhunter Chronicles - All Media Types, Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pre-Canon, Fluff, M/M, mundane!Alec, mundane!Isabelle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-03
Updated: 2016-04-03
Packaged: 2018-05-30 22:04:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6443617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>“Fuck,” Jace swore loudly. No one in the crowd rushing by him seemed to care; he was in New York City, after all. People stood around in the streets cursing all the damn time. He was swearing partially at the confusing map and partially at his own inability to get himself home. He was a shadowhunter, for god’s sake, he was Jace fucking Wayland, and he was being laid low by the New York subway system.</i><br/> <br/>Jace, at the tender age of fourteen, struggles to ride the subway alone for the first time. Thankfully, he meets a friendly mundane who's willing to help him figure it out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fulton Street Station

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kammy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kammy/gifts).



> 1\. Disclaimer: I have limited knowledge of New York and the subway system, so I mostly made this shit up with the help of the subway map. I just picked a random place in Brooklyn to locate the Institute and Alec's house.
> 
> 2\. Why doesn't Jace just portal away from Manhattan back to the Institute? Who knows. Maybe the adults wanted to fuck with him. Maybe they wanted to see if he'd get lost. Who cares, really. 
> 
> 3\. I thought Alec and Isabelle were twins. I guess not? Whatever who cares they are twins in this AU.

Jace studied the subway map, squinting to make out the letters beneath the dirty glass. He was at the Fulton Street station, and he knew he needed to take the A train back into Brooklyn from Manhattan, and then transfer to another train to take him to a stop a few blocks from the Institute, but he couldn’t remember which train he was supposed to take. The mess of colorful lines leading every which way and the many blotchy street names crowding the map didn’t help his concentration. Jace turned his brand-new MetroCard over in his hands as he scanned the map for street names and wracked his brain to try to remember which line he was meant to be taking. Where the hell was the Ditmas Avenue stop? 

“Fuck,” Jace swore loudly. No one in the crowd rushing by him seemed to care; he was in New York City, after all. People stood around in the streets cursing all the damn time. 

He was swearing partially at the confusing map and partially at his own inability to get himself home. He was a _shadowhunter,_ for god’s sake, he was _Jace fucking Wayland,_ and he was being laid low by the New York subway system. It wasn’t even that complicated! He swore again, this time at the Institute chaperones for leaving him on his own to get back to Brooklyn after the meeting with the Manhattan shadowhunters. He would rather have stayed for the reception after the meeting and had to shake hands with some crusty old shadowhunters than admit that he was having a tough time getting home. 

He wasn’t going to concede yet, however, and he returned to staring at the map. 

“Hey, do you need help?” asked a voice behind him, and Jace flinched, startled, before he remembered that he hadn’t activated the rune that made him invisible to mundanes.

Jace whirled around and found himself facing a boy, probably about his age but a little taller, with tousled black hair and a nervous smile. 

Jace figured asking for help from a stranger he would never see again was better than calling the Institute chaperones and surrendering. 

“Yeah,” Jace answered, warily, but he reasoned that if this kid was really a demon or some other sort of dark agent, he could just slit his throat with the knife he wore anyway. “I’m trying to get to Ditmas Avenue and I’m not sure which line to take after I get off the A train.”

“Oh!” The boy exclaimed. “You get off the A train at Borough Hall and take the F down to Ditmas. That’s actually the same route I’m taking, do you want to walk with me?” 

Jace shrugged. “Sure.”

“Come on, we can make the twelve ten train if we hurry,” he said, gesturing in the direction of the dim hallway that lead towards the platform. 

Jace nodded and followed the mundane down the hallway and onto the noisy platform. 

“I’m Alec, by the way,” the boy said. He extended his hand and Jace shook it. He made a point to squeeze Alec’s hand particularly hard, just in case Alec was intending to kill him. If Alec really was just a random friendly mundane, then it was simply a chance for Jace to assert his dominance, which was important because Jace was fourteen and he cared about such things. 

“Jace,” he replied over the rush of the train coming in. Once the doors opened, the two of them followed the crush of people into the train and found a bubble of space near the doors where they could stand not too close to each other, since they were teenage boys and even on the subway personal space was essential to them. 

“Do you live around Ditmas?” Alec asked once the train started moving. Jace noted that the train smelled strongly of sweat, since it was summertime, and the man standing behind him reeked of cigarette smoke. Jace could feel his shirt sticking to his back under the blazer that he had been forced to wear, but he couldn’t take the blazer off without revealing the knife tucked into his belt, so he resigned himself to suffering in the combined body heat of the crowd. 

“Yeah,” Jace said simply. He didn’t want to explain any more in case Alec pried and found out he lived in what Alec would see as an abandoned church. 

“Me too, like, right on 8th Street,” Alec explained. “Where do you go to school?”

Poor Alec was trying his best to make conversation, and Jace wasn’t sure if he had made the best choice by accepting a mundane’s help. They would be on the train for quite a while and they’d probably run out of topics pretty quickly, just due to the fact that Jace couldn’t share ninety percent of the details of his life. Jace considered, now that he knew where to go, simply ditching Alec at the Borough Hall stop and ducking into a separate train car. 

“Uh, I’m homeschooled,” Jace said. It was true, except his homeschooling had a lot less to do with math and vocabulary and a lot more to do with slaying demons and kicking ass. 

“Are you in high school?” Alec asked. “I’ll be a freshman at Brooklyn Prep next year.”

“Kinda,” Jace answered, which was also true. Grades didn’t really matter to shadowhunters, but he’d probably be going into ninth grade if he were in a mundane school. 

Alec gave up on talking to Jace for a moment, probably because Jace had contributed about five syllables to their conversation, but after a few minutes Alec jumped back in and asked Jace his favorite TV show (Jace didn’t watch TV) and then his favorite video game (Jace didn’t play video games) and if he’d seen any good movies recently (Jace hadn’t seen a movie at a theater in months). The trip to Borough Hall was about fifteen minutes, but Alec was content to tell Jace enough about his life that they managed to fill the time pretty easily. He explained that he had been visiting a school friend in Manhattan, and had taken the train all the way from Spring Street. Jace didn’t know where that was, but apparently Alec had already been on the train for half an hour. Jace didn’t think there was anyone in the world for whom he’d ride in a smelly subway car for over an hour.

It wasn’t until they were crowded on the F train--Jace was enjoying listening to Alec talk and had decided not to give him the slip--that they found a conversation topic they could latch onto. 

“I’m also into archery,” Alec commented, and Jace perked up. 

“Sick! I like swords,” Jace said. Alec furrowed his brow, but he was smiling. “Where’d you learn archery?” Jace asked, because as far as he knew archery wasn’t a standard part of mundane school curriculum.

“I’ve been going to this summer camp called Seagull since I was seven, and I learned it there.” Alec explained. “The camp is in North Carolina. Have you heard of it?”

Jace shook his head. Shadowhunters also had summer camp of a sort, but it really just involved younger kids going to Idris and training for hours on end every day for a month. Jace had loved it, but shadowhunter kids could only go until they were thirteen, so Jace had aged out of the program pretty recently. 

“Where’d you learn to use a sword?” Alec asked.

Jace figured some honesty would be fine. “My dad taught me.” 

“Is your dad like, a martial arts guy?” Alec asked.

“No, he’s dead,” Jace admitted. Sometimes he liked to say it just to watch people squirm. 

Alec didn’t squirm, but his eyes went wide. Before he could say something like “I’m sorry,” Jace returned to the topic of Alec’s summer camp. 

Jace found out that Alec was absolutely obsessed with his summer camp, which involved lots of things, from sailing to archery to a bunch of other team-building shit like chants and cheers and campfire stories that Jace had never experienced. At camp Alec had lived in a cabin called the Foxhole, which Jace thought sounded tough and cool, and he won all sorts of prizes for being the best archer. Jace thought he deserved some prizes for being the probably the best shadowhunter swordsman his age, but shadowhunters weren’t keen on giving gifts for stuff they were expected to do anyway. 

Jace and Alec kept up a lively conversation about Alec’s summer camp, which he would be leaving to go to in a few weeks, and how cool various weapons were. Though, Alec admitted, he really did more reading than archery most of the year and knew basically nothing about weapons besides a bow and arrows. Jace was enthusiastic to share as much of his weapons knowledge as he could, and by the time they reached the Ditmas Avenue stop he was just about to pull out his knife and show Alec the shining blade. 

Fortunately for Jace’s impulse control, the train lurched to a stop and he and Alec had to follow the crowd out onto the platform, and then up the stairs onto the street. The Institute wasn’t far from the stop, and though Alec offered to walk Jace to his door so Jace could finish his story about his nunchucks experience, Jace thought it would be better for them to part ways before Alec could see where he lived.

“Do you want to to hang out sometime, though?” Alec asked before Jace said goodbye. 

Jace kind of made a point not to speak to mundanes, and the adults at the Institute probably wouldn’t be too pleased if they found out he was hanging around Brooklyn with a mundane kid, but Alec was pleasant and chill and he seemed to appreciate Jace’s weird stories. Plus, Alec had already proved he wasn’t a supernatural threat by giving up so much personal information, and if he was a regular old mundane threat Jace could easily take him down, despite his reasonably muscular arms. 

So Jace agreed, and they decided to meet at Alec’s house, which, he explained, was on the corner of 18th Avenue and 8th Street, the next day after lunch. 

  


***

Alec was sitting at the kitchen table when Jace knocked at the door. He jumped up to get it, but his dad was already in the living room and beat him to it.

“Hello, is Alec home?” Alec could hear Jace ask through the open door. Alec hurried up behind his dad.

“Hey!” He exclaimed. 

“Oh, you must be Alec’s new friend from school,” Robert said. Alec had told his parents that he had met Jace in his old middle school towards the end of the year and had just now started hanging out with him, just so he wouldn’t have to tell his parents that he had offered help to a random stranger for no reason at the Fulton Street stop in Manhattan. 

Jace didn’t miss a beat. “That’s me. It’s nice to meet you, Mr.--” Jace faltered, then, and Alec remembered that he hadn’t even told Jace his last name.

Fortunately, Alec’s dad didn’t pick up on the fact that it was odd that one of Alec’s school friends wouldn’t know his last name. “Just call me Robert,” he said with a smile.

Once they were done with the pleasantries, Alec ushered Jace into the house before his father could say anything particularly embarrassing. Alec lead him through the dining room towards the stairs, but Jace paused for a minute by the table and looked down at the homework Alec had been working on. 

“What’s this?” Jace asked.

“My geometry homework.” Alec knew he was in a high math level for his grade, but it seemed a little odd to him that Jace wouldn’t even recognize geometry. Maybe, Alec reasoned, his homeschooling math program wasn’t that great. 

“Fuck, looks hard,” Jace noted. He traced a diagram of a cylinder that Alec had drawn in his notes with his finger. 

“It’s not that bad,” Alec shrugged. “Also,” he leaned in closer to Jace to whisper, “my parents don’t like it when we swear in the house.” 

Jace cracked a smile. “That’s fucked up,” he whispered back. Alec giggled, and then started off towards the stairs. 

Alec lead Jace up to his bedroom. In the short, narrow hallway, Alec could hear music playing through Isabelle’s door. At least she hadn’t heard Jace come in, because if she had she’d probably come out of her room just to pester them and flirt with Jace. Jace was admittedly a good-looking guy, and even though he wasn’t exactly Izzy’s type she never really passed up an opportunity to flirt with someone cute. 

Alec could even hear Isabelle’s music when he shut his own door behind he and Jace, but at that moment Alec didn’t care because, he realized, Jace was appraising his room and he was suddenly nervous that Jace would think it was lame or something. He hadn’t even considered that Jace might judge him for his house or for his room before then, but nerves struck him suddenly as he saw Jace looking at the bare walls. At least Alec always kept his room very neat and he had given up his childhood Star Wars sheets a couple years ago, but he was worried that Jace might think he was weird for not having any posters or anything on his walls.

Alec was glad for the plain blue sheets on his neatly-made bed when Jace dropped to a seat on the end of his bed and continued to appraise Alec’s room. 

“It’s...kind of boring, I know,” Alec admitted sheepishly. 

“It’s cool, I don’t have any shit on my walls either,” Jace said. Then he jumped up and looked out Alec’s window into the small rectangle of a backyard that they shared with the neighbors, or maybe through the neighbors’ windows into their houses. During the weekends, if Alec slept with his window open, he’d wake up to the sound of clinking plates, running water in the sink, and his neighbors’ voices. 

“Why not?” Alec asked.

Jace paused, as if considering whether he’d answer the question. “The house is super old and I’m not supposed to damage the walls by hanging stuff up,” he explained. Jace turned around and leaned against the wall. “So what do you want to do?” He asked. 

Alec hadn’t really thought this far. The previous day he had been so invested in getting Jace to his house, for some reason, that he hadn’t taken the time to actually stop and think about what they’d do. 

“Uh,” Alec managed.

“Oh, I know. I’ll show you my sword!” Jace exclaimed. Alec looked Jace up and down to see where he could possibly be hiding a sword, but Jace was already reaching into his belt and producing what looked like just the hilt of a sword. As Alec watched, however, a blade began to extend from the hilt. The blade glowed with an internal white light, and Alec watched Jace in astonishment. It looked like one of the collapsible toy lightsabers Alec and Izzy used to play with as kids, but actually lethal. 

“What the fuck?” Alec murmured.

“I thought you weren’t supposed to swear in the house,” Jace teased.

“I think the situation calls for it. What the _hell_ is that?” He gestured to the glowing blade. 

“It’s my sword. Cool, right?” Jace sliced the air with the sword and Alec was instantly worried for the state of his walls. 

“Um, let’s maybe take this out to the backyard,” Alec suggested. Jace nodded, and Alec watched as the sword collapsed into the hilt again and Jace stowed it back under his jacket. Alec had thought it weird that Jace was wearing a leather jacket in the summertime, but, he supposed, it made sense if Jace was trying to conceal a weapon. Which was actually weirder. Alec wondered if it was legal for Jace to be carrying that thing. It worried him because he didn’t want Jace to get arrested, but it also made him more curious about this strange, taciturn boy.

Jace followed Alec down the stairs and out the door in the kitchen to the backyard. Alec’s dad was still in the living room, so as long as his mom didn’t come home early from her book club (which was mostly an excuse for daytime drinking), and as long as Isabelle didn’t come downstairs, they wouldn’t be interrupted. 

The backyard was just a rectangle of scrubby grass shoved between Alec’s house, the apartment buildings on each side, and a chain link fence separating it from the next “yard” over. 

“Cool, I don’t have a backyard,” Jace said first thing, and Alec held back a sigh of relief. He wasn’t sure why he wanted Jace to think he was cool so badly, since he normally didn’t care about kids his age thinking he was cool, but since he had started talking to Jace at the train station he had felt like it was of the utmost importance. 

Jace stripped off his jacket and dropped it on the grass, and then retrieved his sword from where it was tucked into the waistband of his pants at the middle of his back. The glowing blade extended from the hilt once again, and this time Alec had the chance to be awed by it. 

Now that Jace wasn’t wearing a jacket, Alec could see a dark scar curving down from under the sleeve of Jace’s tee shirt. There was another one on the back of his left wrist that was roughly triangular in shape. There was also a round bruise on Jace’s bicep that was turning greenish. Alec decided not to ask about it, and made a note to himself to offer that Jace could stay at his house whenever he wanted. 

“You wanna see some moves?” Jace asked. He was grinning.

“Totally,” Alec replied, a little more enthusiastically than he had meant to. He dropped into one of the camping chairs that the neighbors had left along the edge of the yard. 

Jace raised his sword and his face fell into a serious, focused expression. Alec wasn’t one for sports except archery, but it looked like the expression Isabelle wore when she was on the pitcher’s mound during a softball game.

And then Jace started to move, first with a long slice through the air from shoulder height down towards his knee, then with more complicated moves that involved twirling around and Alec was floored. Jace moved like the ballerinas Alec had seen when his parents took him to the ballet: smooth, graceful, quick-footed, and with a world of confidence Alec had never been able to access, not even when he held a bow in his hand. Jace moved like he was born to wield a sword; he moved like no teenage boy Alec had ever seen; he moved like he knew what he was doing. Alec felt a rush of awe accompanied by the fear of the dawning realization that Jace could easily hurt him if he wanted to, along with a strange flutter in his stomach that Alec couldn’t name, but was probably just nerves.

Jace came to a halt and Alec just wished he’d keep moving. His hair was falling in his face and he brushed it away with his free hand. 

Alec just looked Jace in the eye for a moment, waiting for Jace to say something, before he realized that Jace wanted Alec to say something. He was looking for Alec’s approval.

“That was...awesome.” _Beautiful_ , Alec thought, but he knew not to say that out loud. 

“Thanks, man,” Jace said. His breathing wasn’t even labored despite the heat and the fact that he had just done some wild sword tricks, one of which involved him jumping up and kicking off the wall of the neighboring apartment building.

“I wish I could do anything even close to that level of awesome.” _Beautiful._ So Alec was jealous. That was it. 

“Yeah, I am pretty awesome,” Jace said with a grin. Alec laughed because he suddenly felt like Jace was the funniest person he had ever met, and Jace laughed along with him. 

Alec was glad that Jace had retracted his sword into the hilt (however he did that), because Isabelle burst through the kitchen door at that moment. Alec noticed Jace quickly tucking the hilt into the back of his pants and covering it with his shirt.

“Hey!” She exclaimed, then turned to Alec. “I didn’t know you had a friend over, Alec.” 

“Yeah, this is Jace--” Jace waved at Isabelle-- “and Jace, this is my sister, Isabelle.”

“You can call me Izzy,” she said with her signature flirty smile. Alec had to stop himself from burying his face in his hands. He had feared this would happen. 

Isabelle crossed the yard and extended a hand to Jace, and Jace shook it. Alec wondered if Jace was giving her the same ridiculously hard handshake that he had given Alec, but if he was, Isabelle wasn’t reacting to it. For all Alec knew, Isabelle was giving him her own ridiculously hard handshake, just because she liked people to know who was the boss. Fuck, maybe Jace and Isabelle would get along.

“I apologize for my brother, he’s exceptionally boring. I’m the fun one in the family,” Isabelle teased with her cloying smile.

“I apologize for my sister, she’s the ass in the family,” Alec snapped.

Jace looked overjoyed that this interaction was happening, so, Alec thought, at least he was smiling. Isabelle gave Alec a pretend-hurt look. 

“I think saying that makes you the family ass,” she retorted. “And, you know, at least I have the best ass in the family.” Isabelle cocked her hip and Alec caught Jace dropping his gaze for a second. Alec decided that this was the worst thing that could possibly happen to him in this moment. 

Alec didn’t want Jace to see he and Isabelle get into an argument, so he didn’t retort. That gave Isabelle the chance to continue. “Hey Jace, what’s your favorite musical? Alec likes _Les Mis._ ” 

“Uh, I’m not sure. What’s _Les Mis_ about?” Jace asked. He looked slightly embarrassed.

“It doesn’t matter,” Alec cut in. “Izzy, do you mind...leaving us alone?” He tried to communicate his desperation with his gaze.

The sibling telepathy that Alec and Izzy had developed must have worked, because Isabelle nodded slightly. 

“Sure, I’ll leave you two to do--” she glanced at Jace-- “whatever it was you were doing out here. But, Jace, say goodbye before you leave, okay?”

“Sure,” Jace said with a smile. Was he watching Isabelle a little too intently? Alec thought he might be and felt a rush of inexplicable annoyance. 

“Thank you,” Alec said to his sister. Isabelle gave Jace a horrible finger-wiggling wave and disappeared back into the house. 

Jace crossed the yard and sat down in the other camping chair beside Alec. 

“I am so sorry for Izzy. She flirts with all my friends,” Alec apologized.

“That’s fine, I know I’m totally irresistible to the ladies,” Jace joked. Or maybe he wasn’t joking, because Alec would believe that Jace, with his perfect blond hair and his bright eyes and his muscular arms, was incredibly popular with girls, but Alec laughed anyway. He sort of hoped that Jace wasn’t that popular with girls, just because Alec wasn’t too gangly and awkward to be popular, and he didn’t want Jace to be cooler than him in that respect as well. 

“Do you have a girlfriend?” Alec asked, even though he hadn’t really planned to. 

“Nah. You?” 

“No. Girls don’t like me,” Alec admitted. 

“No way. You’re cool.” Jace said. Alec could feel himself blushing, which was stupid, but those words felt like the ultimate honor coming from Jace. 

***

Jace realized that he had told the truth and, yeah, Alec was pretty cool, and not just for a mundane. Jace was getting tired of shadowhunters: they were so full of themselves and all got off on talking about how powerful they were. Alec, though, was down-to-earth enough that, even though he did cool shit like archery and liked sophisticated stuff like theater and was good at math, he didn’t brag about anything. He was also incredibly welcoming, and soon offered that Jace could stay at his house whenever he wanted, which was pleasant because shadowhunters were usually so weird about keeping people out of their houses.

He was easy to talk to because of that, and because he didn’t pry into Jace’s business. Jace knew he had been taking a risk by taking off his jacket without putting on a glamor first, but after Alec’s politeness the previous day Jace didn’t even bother wasting the energy on a rune to hide them. Even though Jace barely knew Alec, and he didn’t trust people very easily, there was something about Alec that made Jace believe he could trust him in the future.

The two of them talked outside for a while, quite a bit about _Les Mis_ because Jace asked again what it was, until the sun dipped below the next door apartment building and Jace realized he needed to get back to the Institute. Jace let Alec lead him to the door, and Jace waved at Izzy through the doorway of the living room. Izzy waved back. She was cute, with her wavy dark hair and her big dark eyes and her nose that looked exactly like Alec’s; Jace wouldn’t mind seeing her again. 

At the door, Jace realized he was hesitant to leave. He didn’t have a lot of close shadowhunter friends since they were mostly assholes, and the Institute was full of boring adults. Alec’s company was a welcome reprieve. 

Thankfully, Alec seemed to want to hang out again. “Do you want to come over again, like, before I leave for Seagull? Izzy has an Xbox and we could play some games.” 

“Yeah, definitely,” Jace said, and his voice came out breathier than he had expected. “Do you want my number?”

Alec nodded furiously and took out his phone. Jace gave Alec his number and Alec promised to text him. 

“All right,” Jace said reluctantly. “Bye.” He thought Alec looked equally reluctant to say goodbye, or at least he hoped Alec was. He felt himself get slightly nervous that Alec wasn’t going to text him at all, and he’d never see him again, but he thought it would be too lame to ask Alec for his number when he’d said he’d text Jace. 

“See you,” Alec said, and Jace turned away and walked down the front steps. He forced himself to not look back. 

When Jace was about a block away, he checked his phone to see if Alec had texted yet. He saw a new message from an unfamiliar number, so he opened it.

_Hey! It’s Alec. Btw, my last name is Lightwood. Want to hang next weekend?_

Jace smiled and started typing. 

_Wayland. And sure._

**Author's Note:**

> thank u Kammy for providing me with this AU idea


End file.
